CCW & The Power of German Community

What is CCW?

Critical Communications World or CCW for short is an international event held in a different part of the world each year. This year the event took place in Berlin on May 15th & 16th. At the event, dozens of companies from all over the globe gather to showcase their critical communication solutions and products, be it services, hardware, software or apps. We were situated at the Critical Communications Finland booth.

Jolla, who’s flexible, reliable and independent solution: Sailfish OS, is intrinsically private and secure, is highly relevant at such events.

What did we do there?

We showcased our product, our capabilities to adapt to different communication scenarios and met with our German community afterwards.

We had 3 sessions during the event: a panel discussion, a debate session and a short company pitch. Our CEO, Sami Pienimäki, took part in both the debate and the company pitch, alongside our Chief Engineer, Marko Saukko, representing Sailfish OS at the panel discussion.

Sami Pienimäki @ Debate panel

Marko Saukko & Sami @ CCW

CCW Hall

Sailfish OS can easily be adapted to run on different hardware with a variety of form factors and can be configured and customised exactly as the customer wishes with solutions such as MDM (Mobile Device Management).

In critical communication a word that often comes up is “legacy”, indicating the importance of providing ongoing support for many older technologies and devices as well as delivering new solutions. Indeed there is need to ensure that devices are supported and maintained for many years after their initial launch, to insure the integration of new technologies and maintenance of security for the devices along the way. Jolla has extensive experience in this area, and still supports and maintains our first device “Jolla Phone”, launched in 2013.

While walking around the event and discussing with the different exhibitors it was clear that participation in this “ecosystem” requires versatile and scalable solutions integrated to long service life infrastructure such as buses, ambulances, drones, tablets and phones. Sailfish 3 brings more scalability with support for feature phone and PDA type devices in addition to existing form factors such as Phones, Tablets and Watches.

Addressing privacy and security is important to the ecosystem and SailfishOS provides a solid solution for a secure and privacy-respecting product out of the box. You can then plug in features such as secure VPN communication to the Sailfish OS frameworks either with your own, or already provided, technologies. With Sailfish OS you are not locked to our cloud services and servers, but instead you have the freedom to choose a provider of your own. Many companies at the event commented that when they selected a platform they had to first strip down certain services and even change some components in order to reach the privacy requirements.

It was also very rewarding to notice at the event that the same device that we originally launched the Sailfish X program back in October of 2017 with Sony Xperia X, is also used in critical communications by other parties. This gives us good experience of devices that are already approved at this market segment and with the Xperia XA2 targeting to be released later this year, will provide us with yet another platform that makes our solution available for hardware from vendor that is already utilised in this ecosystem.

Community meetup

On May 17th, we arranged a community meetup in Berlin, in the Pfefferbräu restaurant, with a lot of beer, food and discussion.

Numerous community meetups in different countries and continents have given us an idea of how active a community can be in a certain area. Our community in Germany set a new standard for us and made us extremely proud to have such a powerful voice in the country. We can only say that you guys ROCK! Over 30 people turned up at the meetup and made it an unforgettable evening for all of us.

The technical depth was great too. With the huge participation came also an incredible amount of discussion on different topics, varying from discussing about the history and how we ended up here, (at some point there was a show of N9′s ), to discussions about possible issues they have found as well as suggesting what features this community would like to see next. As an example a feature request was to automatically storie local vocabulary in the respective keyboard. We even had participants at the event with their own company looking to utilise Sailfish OS in their future business.

One of the most discussed topic was SIP calls, which we are looking into how we could integrate it into our core offering. Connectivity and VPN were topics that were discussed and the members of community gave their insights of the current functionality. There were also a group of members that had completed localisation for Bulgarian language by translating the provided strings in the community poodle, and there were also discussions about the audio issues some community members were having with different headsets and Bluetooth devices.

Last but not least, we discussed the possiblity of Jolla attending Chaos Computer Congress (CCC), Europe’s largest association of hackers in Germany.

We would like to especially thank our dear community member ExPLIT and Nokius for helping us with the organisation of this event, and also thank each and everyone of you that attended the meetup. See you next time! <3

Cheers,
James

James Noori

Community Manager at Jolla. Gadget geek. Open source supporter and advocate. Long time Jolla blogger in a third party blog. Ready to change the world with unique and unusual alternatives!

Thanks James. I’ll keep my eyes on the blog, and being constantly ready to order / buy a SFOS smart watch for my Xperia Sailfish X. However, please hurry up with the information, because we as buying customers are very impatient. As mentioned early, please send us a questionairy etc. of willingness to buy the SFOS smart watch … asap. We are all the time under influences of other competitors of you, too.

The tablet money, and a whole bunch more, was spent on developing the tablet and Sailfish 2.0 so any refund money is has to come out of whatever profits they make in the future. As for making the whole OS open source, they don’t have sole ownership to the whole source code (much of it is co-owned by investors) so releasing it all as open source isn’t completely up. They’ve said it more than once that they’d like to release it all as open source, but simply can’t because they don’t have permission from the investors.

So while you and a bunch of other regular whiners may take some form of pleasure spamming your whining into the comments to every single post in the Jolla blog, it’s not helping anyone. If you have something new or insightful then post it, but your spam is the stuff shadow bans were invented for.

Come on, the last thing that is of interest is refund. Happy to see/read new news about sailfish, i hope it will go on and wish all the best. Just a question, has anybody thought to ask German givernment to switch to sailfish. When someone reads the mail regarding gdpr this is how it should be and which matches pretty well to german understanding of it

You shouldn’t have invested in a tablet. Its the last needed thing on the world, my smartphone has more functionality and its easier to carry, a notebook has even more functions so why on earth a tablet is needed? But there is a way out for you: spend refund and get sailfish x license. Otherwise: go to mummy whining, i mean are 200 euro worth that amount on negative influence in your life? Calm down a bit and wait, probably you will be surprised if money comes back in a year and inbetween you had a better life since you didnt think that negative

Maybe for Jolla will be a great idea to participate in the yearly Chaos Communication Congress (now 35c3), between Christmas and New Year.
Hopefully you can make a speech to present Sailfish and win the support of this amazing community.
Look here to find more information about the last event.https://events.ccc.de/congress/2017/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
Its really big and a lot of interesting people there.

The only trouble with CCC is the timing of it. At that time of the year, most of the sailors are on vacation and are enjoying the Christmas holiday’s time. But let’s see what we can bring onto the table. Fingers crossed we can manage something for CCC!

You should very well be optimistic and very excited about Sailfish 3! We are hard at work to deliver it to the community. We are glad to hear that you are joining the family by purchasing a Sony Xperia XA2! Hopefully we will have the OS ready and in place very soon!

Hello, I would say, as always, the best way is to comment on the refund post, not every single new post. We will come back to you when we have an update. I repeat myself again, we have said that paying back the refunds are in direct relation to our positive cash flow. If we earn money, we will refund you. It would be nice if you could stick to the refund post and comment there. I will reply if I see necessary.

Yes, the same 4 accounts (including probable sock puppets) that whine in the comments to every single Jolla blog post… Seriously, get a life because Jolla has been very clear on the fact that they’ll pay out refunds as their financial situation allows them and when it does, they’ll have an update for you on it. Your spam does absolutely nothing to change this.

Except whining I have bought a brand new xperia and licence of the fish to help the refund process. But it is just collecting dust. Pretty much useless to help Jolla since we don’t get any updates. So the best way is to voice your opinion.

….because after the royal screw up that was the tablet fiasco (I didn’t bother with it) the best thing to do is to march anyone aggrieved by it into the woods, have them kneel down and give them a double tap to the back of the head with a silenced revolver yes!?!

If you want people to stop complaining about it then ask Jolla to FIX THE PROBLEM……simply banning people who express their continued disapproval of how the situation has been dealt with would be a further PR disaster for Jolla.

It doesn’t matter if it’s refunds or new devices etc, Jolla are poor at keeping their supposed “community” in the loop.

It’s like trying to get blood from a stone when attempting to get relevant information from Jolla so I for one fully understand why people get frustrated or feel the need to make repeated posts asking for the same thing again and again……that’s on Jolla, not the customer!

You should try being more empathic towards your fellow users rather than asking for people to be banned!

We’re not talking about any kind of constructive criticism here. No, it’s the same accounts making the exact same complaints year in and year out to every.. single.. new… Jolla blog post even thou Jolla has repeatedly addressed the complaints long ago.

To repeat what Jolla has said countless times already: Refunds will be paid out when money for them is available and when there is, there’s going to be additional information on that.

When 25000 People are fine with it, but only a small amount of spammers whine in every blog post about their refunds – the problem seems not on the Jolla Side. Its on your side. If you have something constructive to say (critics CAN be also something constructive) – please, but if you want whine in every blog post about your shitty 1/2 of refund – i’m not fine with it. There is a refund block post on Jolla blog, there is a refund post on tmo and tjc. Go there and whine there. Anything else is simply offtopic and looks and feels like spam.

Why not block the same 4 troll accounts that keep attacking swindled backers?
Your delusion of “25000 People are fine with it” is more than a joke, it is offensive to most of us that are unhappy but keep mostly silent.

No its not a joke. I’m a quite active community member and i know, whats going on in the Sailfish community. I don’t say, that anything is pink – what Jolla do. Sometimes i also have some critics. But “whining over refunds” simply doesn’t belong in every blog post. Its imho simply asocial.

Its a shame that every time jolla put out a new blog post about something positive like this post it gets spammed by “the refund army”. Its a small company creating an excellent product with limited money and limited resources. Maybe its time to refocus the energy in promoting jolla and showing what a great product they have.

It was a great community meeting in Berlin. I’m still thrilled by the inspiring and motivating conversation with Sami and Marko and I can’t wait to continue our dialogue about using Sailfish Os in commercial products.

After the WWDC keynote this Monday, I’m even more convinced, that Jolla is now the one, who thinks different.

Admittedly, iOS has a high degree of maturity and is up to date with both AI and AR. But I can not shake off the feeling that the system has become too complex, although AI and NLP should make everything easier. It does not help the user to focus on what matters. There is room for innovation, for a real alternative.

Thanks for the update! Just wanted to point out a tiny mix-up. In the blog post you state:
“Last but not least, we discussed the possiblity of Jolla attending Chaos Computer Club (CCC), Europe’s largest association of hackers in Germany.”